Mission to Moscow.

On this day in 1987, a West German teenager flew 400 miles across the Soviet Union in a small plane to land at the heart of what Ronald Reagan called the evil empire. He said he wanted to strike a blow for world peace, and, bizarrely enough, he succeeded.

Mathias Rust was a 19-year-old bank clerk in Hamburg when he got his idea to deliver a 20-page manifesto on world peace to Mikhail Gorbachev. He hoped that he could prove the good intentions of the Soviet Union, and thus help end the Cold War, by flying unmolested over its territory.

He started his odyssey by flying to Reykjavik, the site of the historic Reagan-Gorbachev summit a few months earlier. Reagan’s rejection of Gorbachev’s offer to rid the world of nuclear weapons had depressed Rust, but then spurred him to action. After visiting the site of the conference, the young pilot flew to Helsinki, filed a fake flight plan for Stockholm, and set off southeastward on his adventure.

It was bold, but also crazy. Four years earlier, the Soviets had shot down a Korean Air Lines jet that had wandered into their airspace, killing 269 people. Rust knew he might meet a similar fate. So he brought along a motorcycle helmet in case he needed to make an emergency landing.

The Soviets tracked Rust throughout his flight, but decided the plane must be “friendly.” No foreigner would be rash enough to fly through the Soviet Union, they believed. As it turned out, the legacy of the KAL disaster helped Rust: after 1983, Soviet officers were never supposed to shoot down a possible civilian aircraft except on orders from the highest military officials. And no one sought to alert those officials.

At about 1000 feet above the ground, Rust’s single-engine Cessna flew through the “Ring of Steel” around the world’s most heavily defended city and headed toward Red Square. Rust saw an opening on a bridge leading to the square and touched down between the wires. He taxied to a photogenic stop in front of the turrets and domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral.

At first, the people in the square thought it must be a movie crew, or perhaps Gorbachev’s private plane. But when the boy emerged, a crowd gathered to congratulate him. Soon, black sedans sped to the square, and men in dark suits emerged to confiscate cameras and take Rust away. But even the KGB seemed a little reluctant to condemn him. They reported that he seemed a little, well, crazy – not quite responsible for his actions. He was charged with illegal entry, illegal flying, and malicious hooliganism. He pled guilty only to the first two charges, because what was malicious about world peace? In the end, he spent about 14 months in prison.

The Soviet bloc was all about border controls (think the Berlin Wall). In fact, May 28 was the national day to honor Soviet border guards, though Rust did not know this. Gorbachev responded with the “Rust massacre”: he demoted or retired hundreds of officers, including the defense minister. Some Soviet officials complained that they could not win. “You criticize us for shooting down a plane, and now you criticize us for not shooting down a plane,” huffed a Soviet spokesman to the foreign press.

The incident may have shortened the life of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev used the crisis to purge the military of officers he believed were hostile to his reforms. Moreover, the stunt undermined the legitimacy of the Soviet state. The emperor, it appeared, had no clothes. It was difficult for the Soviet people to respect a totalitarian state that allowed a 19-year-old in a motorcycle helmet and a red aviator suit to float down to a national landmark with his message of peace.

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19 comments

I lived in Poland back then and there wasn’t a day, really, when I didn’t encounter some form of civil unrest. It wasn’t quite what it may have looked like from the West, though. Google “Orange Alternative” if you’d like to know more about the less publicized aspects of where we’re coming from. Rust’s Red Square landing was in that category – possibly bold, possibly crazy, but most of all surreal.

Several interesting events coincided with the final stretch of his route. The control system of the Central Air Defence District was unexpectedly turned down for unscheduled maintenance, and all flights around Sheremetyevo airport were forbidden for about twenty minutes — just for the time Rust was above it. The origins of these events are still unknown.

Igor Morozov, former KGB colonel, noted: “this was a brilliant operation developed by foreign intelligence services. 20 years later, it’s becoming clear that the foreign intelligence agencies were able to get the support of people in the circles closest to Gorbachev and to predict his reaction precisely. Their purpose was to discredit the armed forces of the USSR and to weaken the international position of the Soviet Union”

The Russians sure do love their conspiracy theories. I’m surprised Morozov didn’t suggest that Gorbachev planned it with in league with the CIA himself

Short version: the USSR couldn’t feed its own people, and was buying food with oil. When the price of oil collapsed in the 80’s, they had to get loans which they couldn’t repay. So the Western governments forced them to abandon the armed support of their empire in order to get those loans.

In Gaidar’s theory, the man responsible for the destruction of Soviet Union is Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, not Ronald Reagan. In any case, by the time that the USSR had to beg funding from Western governments, it was Bush I in office. Reagan’s military buildup destroying Soviet Union is just so much bull.

Dunno about ‘bull’ – you could make a fair argument that the USSR was going to go down the can as soon as the rest of the world stopped propping it up; but you have to give Reagan some credit [schmuck that he was] for deciding that all those nukes pointed at Washington weren’t reason enough to keep playing nice…

Re “Russians love their conspiracy theories” see “9/11 was an inside job.”

According to polls, a third of Americans believe 9/11 conspiracy theories. Around 70% believe in JFK conspiracy theories. Russians credit conspiracies at JFK conspiracy levels. They believe in the opposite of Hanlan’s razor: “Conspiracy before cock-up”.

For example, consider the following headline. Russian Poll: 84% Say Truth About 9/11 Being Deliberately Hidden. The poll was taken in 2008, and I doubt that the Russian responders spent much time paying attention to 9/11 in the last 7 years, yet in the absence of evidence, most of them find conspiracy plausible. I think it’s a result of living under communism, where any news not supporting the party’s line were suppressed. Result – chronic distrust of publicly available news.

My only encounters with 9/11 conspiracy thinking were in Italy. This could just be because that’s where I spent 2002-5, the prime truther period; but I think it’s also because modern Italian history has actually been driven by conspiracies and unresolved terroristattacks.

a third of Americans believe 9/11 conspiracy theories. Around 70% believe in JFK conspiracy theories

If you don’t have kids, you might not know that there are a lot of kids’ books that repeat stuff like Lincoln’s secretary was named Kennedy, Elvis might still be alive, etc. etc. It’s all in the vein of “cool secret stuff!” and if you, like me, have a kid that loves that sort of thing you end up buying these books and are then sort of surprised when your kid tells you he thinks Elvis might still be alive.

Someone spay-painted “Bush did 9/11!” on the back yard wall of my apartment building so I get to think about that more than I want. The back yard is mostly a mosquito breeding ground, though, so I don’t go there much. But it’s true- conspiracy theories are ripe in Russia and have been for a long time. (The Elders of Zion stuff came from there, after all.) My impression living there was that it was more common. But then again, I’m pretty much convinced that the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow were an inside job set up by Berezovsky w/ FSB help that turned out to backfire on Berezovsky in the end. But then, I lived in Ryazan so we were more inclined to think the FSB, or at least parts of it, were planting bombs, because they were.